Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a
mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An
ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks
escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and,
eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment
and devastating consequences. Flaubert's erotically charged and
psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on
its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women
claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted:
"Madame Bovary, c'est moi." One of the greatest novels of the 19th
century, Flaubert's torrid debut lives on in Geoffrey Wall's brilliant
translation. This edition features an introduction by Wall, and a
preface on Emma Bovary's femininity and modernity by novelist Michèle
Roberts.
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardcover Clothbound Classics series,
designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable
and collectible editions are bound in high-quality, tactile cloth with
foil stamped into the design.